Oddly, I find the search in Slack, Teams, and Discord to be so horrible I don’t create any “knowledge there.” It’s like trying to write a paper on the telephone.
Anyone putting long form stuff into an IM system is taking the way of pain.
Anyone putting long form stuff into an IM system is taking the way of pain.
I wasn't suggesting an IM system should be the source of truth for long-form documentation. But searching Slack works better than searching email you weren't cc'd on. Virtually anything is better than email for many essential aspects of collaboration.
Want to add someone to the mailing list and loop them in? How many prior emails will you forward to them?
Someone replies to one of several points in an email, someone else wants to address a different point, and there are a mix of habits and patterns for whether / how much / where to quote or include the previous messages in a response....
vs adding someone to a channel where they can review the conversation history, and some combination of threads and links to additional channels or external resources can adequately support whatever direction(s) the conversation takes.
In any case, it's the wrong tool for the job in so many ways, so much of the time. Hence my recommendation to keep emails to 5 sentences, and to prefer communication tools that properly support multiuser collaboration.
may i ask what age bracket or generation you are? only if you're comfortable sharing, of course.
im in my 60s. and im curious if our difference of opinion here is a product of what technologies were/are available during the start & prime of our careers. i very well might be in stubborn old man mode subconciously.
Otherwise, I can search email quite effectively. And oddly, its one of the few things Office Copilot is goos at.
I don’t email is a collaboration tool. It’s an information sharing tool and maybe workflow. Just today I had to email out to like 20 people a data call with a couple paragraphs of instruction. It’s much better than Slack for this. And I can search and find my email and their responses for all of eternity (I’ve got every email going back 20+ years instantly searchable in outlook, good luck finding a slack message from a month ago much less a decade).
That's almost the entirety of my point. Sure, email works well for simple, unidirectional / broadcast comms. But for async collaboration involving multiple recipients and any kind of back and forth, it's inherently problematic.